nice-personSteven’s father couldn’t stop talking that day about the weather (windy, cold) and the Lennon Sisters who’d stolen his wife’s singing career. At one point, he clutched my hand with his own cold bone fingers. A wadded wet tissue passed between us. Steven was there, of course, it was his mother dying in the room. His alcoholic brother Ron and their skinny sister, whose name I couldn’t remember, came and stood silent. I remember the sister was in the porn industry, but did something behind the camera. And the uncle who was a doctor showed up, but no one had spoken to him in years.

*

I went to the beach because I was finally free, heart ripped wide open. And when my toes sank into the wet sand, the salt water bit at my freshly shaved legs, and I drank up half the ocean. I was that thirsty.

*

We sat outside and smoked. Our hair caught the static of the wind. Steven’s son Raul, the dark-eyed one with the criminal record, told me that he trusted me more than anyone else in the world. Raul was an all-right kid, but he had no sense of direction. It made me sad. I wondered when someone was going to come and yell at us for smoking at a yellow table bedside a shedding ficus in the courtyard of a hospice near a sign that read, “No Smoking!”

*

The waves were like hands all over my body. I closed my eyes, and for the first time in a really long time, maybe forever, I surrendered into everything; wanting, needing sex inside of my body, yearning and aching to be known in a way that only a woman who has given everything aches to be known and loved.

*

In the room at the hospice, his family, the miserables, stared as I caressed their mother’s hairless arm. They were disgusted by my weakness. I had waited through his best friend’s brain tumor, the car accident, and the death of the old dog. Why couldn’t I pull the plug? I was a nice person. But how many tragedies was a nice person supposed to wade through for a man she’d never even loved?

*

The wind picked up. Two young women with brown skin carried a small boy down the sandy incline. He wore red pants and a blue baseball cap, and for a while, I just lay there melting into the warm sand—thank you forever and a thank you—until the loud German tourists bounded down over the rocks.

*

She had no teeth, someone must have put them in a glass or case or pocket. Somebody mentioned Cantors, but no one was hungry. It’s almost time, the uncle doctor said. And so we formed a circle around the small bed, Steven still absent, unable to handle it, smoked somewhere illegally. Each miserable reluctantly took a part of her body. All that remained was the right foot. I cupped the rigid bare toes between my warm hands. The long yellowed nails, hard as talons, cut into the skin of my palms. We watched the rise up and clatter down of her chest—one beat, then one two, each inhale more shallow—mesmerized—one two three, each exhale moving farther apart, until our breath and the death rattle moved in sync, fading into the great mystery.

*

The German tourists, boisterous and happy on their camera snapping vacation, sat down behind me. They put out a sandwich spread and opened beer cans. I picked up my shoes and walked toward the virile boys of Malibu surfing in the pink twilight.

*

Steven’s uncle knew the moment her heart stopped. Without the tube, the ventilator, without any water or food, teeth and hair gone, only the skeleton remained. It’s over, he said. But I stayed, petting her foot, easy now, there you go, easy does it, that’s all right, very good, sleep tight. And then I went and found Steven and told him to fetch the hospice worker.

*

When I wasn’t invited to the family memorial, I took my break and ran, leaving Steven’s grief as easily as if it had never happened. Never trust a nice person, I should have told Raul that day at the hospice. We give and give and give, holding our breath until there’s nothing left, and then we disappear like the red sun melting into the ocean.
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Staci Greason is the author of The Last Great American Housewife. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Angel’s Flight Literary West, The Huffington Post, and many others. She also coaches fellow writers at The Write Muse.

Artwork by Allison Dalton